


Guilt

by Assimbya



Category: Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 10:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/608607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Assimbya/pseuds/Assimbya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isolde von Linden searches for answers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guilt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [furies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/furies/gifts).



There are no answers there, only an empty hole in the ground, only the paper in her hand, crisp and typewritten, telling her of her father’s death. He would have died anyway, she tells herself, by a bomb or a bullet, but this is hard for her, this mystery, harder, somehow than the straight-forwardly tragic deaths of the rest of her family. Isolde likes stories. She does not like this brisk announcement of death, which seems to be trying to choke all possible stories like a weed-killer. She thinks of cutting up the paper and pasting its words in new combinations, as if her sharp silver scissors could make space for the story her father never told her.

Isolde von Linden was a poet. Or she considered herself a poet, at least, though when young girls call themselves poets they are very frequently laughed at. She had considered herself, before the war, to be a peculiarly _German_ poet - she read Heine and Rilke and Holderlin and she had thought long and hard about the type of poetry her nation demanded, the type of poetry appropriate to the scarred, angry land in which she had grown up. During the war, she had not known what to think. Her father, who loved his country more than anyone else she knew, had told her they must support any effort to further the glory of Germany, but he had sent her so quickly out of their homeland, into Switzerland where the war could not touch her. She had wanted to ask him pressing, difficult questions about what their country was doing, but she could speak to him in nothing but letters that would be censored. When she listened to Hitler’s speeches over the radio or read news reports about the numbers of dead, she had to imagine her father for herself, how he - unbendingly moral, unfailingly patriotic - would navigate the ugliness of that time.

But the war is over and she does not know what it means to be a poet. She does not know what language she will write in, when both French and German are so layered over with association that she cannot find the words, pure and simple, beneath memories of speeches, commands, secrets. She thinks that her plain, unaccented French may yet save her life, in this world newly hostile to the sound of German.

She thinks that, whatever poems she writes in the future, her father will never have read them.

-

Anna Engel does not want to answer Isolde’s questions. She is a pale woman, hard and narrow. “You do not want to know,” she tells Isolde, her voice betraying nothing.

“I know what I want,” she says. They are speaking in French. Her voice sounds young, school-girlish, even to her own ears. “Tell me how my father died.”

“He shot himself.” Anna looks down at her coffee. She does not meet Isolde’s eyes.

Isolde will not let herself weep, or flinch. She thinks of Kleist. She does not think, _did his hand shake? did he think of me as he did it? was he afraid?_

No - she does think all that. But she holds it, tight inside her, coiled up small and safe. She will take it out later, unwind it, and grieve. If she can grieve. If this is not too unthinkable for grief. Nothing, she knows, is too unthinkable for grief. Not in this age through which she has lived.

“Why?” she asks, though it is a bad question, she knows, it is not the sort of question that will give her the story that she needs.

“I don’t know,” Anna says, sharply. But she relents, “Guilt, no doubt.”

A single word, but it rings in Isolde’s head. A poem coalesces around it.

To ask what he had to feel guilty for would be foolish beyond belief - there are so many things for which her uncompromising, precise father could have felt guilt. But she needs to know the story. “What was his work, in Ormaie?”

Anna stubs out her cigarette. “I don’t think you want to know, Fraulein von Linden. But I will not keep the truth from you.”

-

There are notebooks upon notebooks, bound in calfskin. Isolde reaches out and touches the surface of one. She opens it.

It is in her father’s handwriting.

“I wrote out a clean copy,” Anna says, “for his superiors, but no one bothered what happened to the originals. They are his notes. I suppose you may well have them, now. They are your inheritance.”

There is light cruelty in that turn of phrase, but Isolde does not care, for Anna has endangered herself with this generosity. And she cannot even bear to think of this painful embarrassment of riches, her father’s hand, her father’s words.

She will bear it. She will bear whatever ugliness these books contain.

“Thank you,” she tells Anna, touching the lines of print. She will read them when she is alone.

-

Perhaps, she will think much later, some stories are not hers to tell. But if she does not tell them, then how will they ever be told?


End file.
